Flatiron School: Fostering Creativity through Design

Brand Design, Creative Direction, Environmental Design

The Flatiron School offers Full stacked web and iOS development programs within their NYC campus. The objectives were to refresh the existing brand to align with their newly defined values and establishing brand design to bring cohesion to the product, marketing, and space design. My role was Creative Director / Lead product designer collaborating with Flatiron's Leadership team, Office manager (Carley) and Interior architect firm MCDC. I worked closely with the printers to coordinate print schedule and installation.

Design to Inspire creativity

The brand design needed to reflect Flatiron's range of values; diversity, collaboration, rigor, inspiring creativity. After working with different branding agencies, the team realized the values conflicted greatly to be successfully communicated within a single logo mark. A plan was devised to align the most important school value of 'rigor and hard work' within the brand mark while using the brand design to create a system that represented the other brand values with a strong emphasis on creative inspiration.

Design Process and fact finding

Some key concerns were identified after speaking with staff and students:

1. Flexible space to accommodate the various events hosted on the campus: Meetups, Social mixers, parties, science fair and student presentations.

2. Reduced preparation and clean up time.

3. Increase classroom, meeting rooms and collaborative spaces.

Collaboration and Co working space

Flatiron School encouraged students and staff to work together. The internal team worked closely with the architects to define the campus space layout for optimal usage, offering multiple areas for creating flexible collaborative workspaces. Students can easily gather and work freely anywhere within the campus.

Easy to configure floor plan

Prior to the redesign, the campus space was not fully utilized and required hours of manual labor to get ready for any event. With this in mind, the Flatiron team worked with the architects to solve this problem. Mixing different sizes and shape table that can be configured in multiple ways to accommodate events or collaborative learning. The design made it easy to configure table groupings in many different ways while maintaining a clean look at the new design.

The past, present and future

A contemporary, friendly ambiance was delivered through simple materials and striking graphics installations. At the centerpiece of the revamped campus is a collaborative graffiti wall created by students, staff and NYC street artists. The wall reflects the ethos and ideals of the brand and serves to inspire past, present, and future students of the power of coding. Representing diversity and collaboration.

Illustrations created by Mitch Boyer. He created these amazing drawings for Flatiron School's blog and social media. Showcasing the history of technology and programming.